Holistic Recovery from Schizophrenia

Thrown back up through the nether world

Last week I spent three days in bed with a nasty viral infection, leaving me this week with little enthusiasm to tackle a daily blog post or even edit what I “churn” out. With Christmas fast approaching and my youngest due home from college in three days, you will be hearing less and less from me for a while. The flu that held me in his vice-like grippe for three days made me feel like I had been dragged through the seven gates of hell and back.

There is not much to report on the holistic recovery front. I was dismayed to see the article in the New York Times about the drugging of children on Medicaid. When did primary school performance (primary school no less!) become so important? Makes you wonder who the insane folks really are. The saddest part of the article for me was the mother who somehow had allowed herself seven years ago to be talked into believing that her three year old son was mentally disturbed. Now she has a ten year old son with adult health problems and still seems to feel that she has chosen the right course of action.

I remember the ease with which young parents bought into Ritalin when my own children were small. As girls gained political ascendancy in the school system boys became more and more viewed as a nuisance factor. They were expected to take on the characteristics of girls, not to be valued for their own characteristics of fearlessness, civil disobedience, curiosity, and physical strength.

Since undergoing sound therapy, I am much more aware that my dreams are a bridge to somewhere else in me. The dreams haven’t changed, but something in me has changed about my relationship to them.

It is easier for me to see sound therapy’s effect on Chris. After his first session he started a daily jogging routine. His body moves with more fluidity. I am noticing less and less of those awkward mechanical moves.

Ian and I had insisted at our last meeting with Dr. Stern that the Serdolect be eliminated completely. Chris’s medication is finally starting to be lowered. Chris has been extraordinarily tired, which signals to me that the sound therapy is helping him get better by reducing the need for the medication. The “need” for the medication lasting beyond the initial crisis period is the view of the psychiatrists at the hospital, not mine.

Information overload

Here is an e-mail I received from the sound shaman in response to Chris’s latest write-up of his experiences undergoing sound therapy.
http://holisticschizophrenia.blogspot.com/2009/11/sound-shaman-as-therapist.html

“Thank you Rossa, I am glad that we seem to be making positive progress. Chris is a wonderful and deeply sensitive young man, and in my opinion, he needs to gain a deeper understanding that the mind, with it’s endless stream of chatter and unceasing kaleidoscope of imaginings, is not who he really IS.

We have a serious problem in our modern society: it is that we have forgotten what it is to be silent. Our world is trapped in an uncontrollable spiral whose velocity is in the danger zone. Young people are being subjected to an ever schizophrenic society – just watch an hour of MTV, the Saturday morning cartoons, or a typical video game – the number of messages evoked through sound and image is equivalent to what we (as parents in our generation) would have been exposed to in almost a year of media. In earlier generations, this amount of new information would have been absorbed over decades. It is no wonder that our children have difficulty concentrating, sitting still, or thinking coherently – much less understanding their emotions as they are being bombarded with largely irrelevant, incoherent, and manipulative information at an ever increasing rate. It is unlikely that this frenzied multi-media phenomenon will change in the near future, thus it is more important than ever to find ways to offload or discharge this very negative influence.

As we can demonstrate with measurements, our thoughts influence our electrical field, which in turn influences the atomic and molecular cohesion in the body. The rising incidence of disease in children in modern societies, such as allergies, psychological problems, etc., is not just a result of environmental pollution or bad diet, rather I believe, that it is very much related to the disturbance of the body’s electrical field due to an oversupply of sensory and conceptual information. To heal, we need not medicate our children or give them ever more activities, rather we need to teach them to appreciate silence, stillness, and relaxation. Observing the flow of a river in the forest is far more therapeutic to our information overloaded children than any antidepressant!”

The true believers

I have noticed that the people who have recovered from schizophrenia and who believe that recovery is not only possible, but permanent, are people who have undergone certain psychotherapies and/or rituals or have simply wrested recovery away from the views of the professionals and placed the responsibility on themselves. They have either taken themselves outside the system and chosen a do-it-yourself approach (e.g. recovered by whatever means they had at their disposal) or else entrusted themselves to the views of psychiatrists and therapies who are also not part of the mainstream, e.g. transpersonal psychology (Stanislav Grof), transactional analysis (Eric Berne), shamanic journeys.

Getting there sooner rather than later

Another reason why I like the book, The Alcoholism and Addiction Cure by Chris Prentiss is because he maintains that if you want to get to the bottom of your problems, the multiple therapy approach is best and it works faster. Many people can go for years seeing the same therapist and never become well or else not well enough. This may be because they are undergoing the wrong therapy or perhaps because they do not have a good rapport with the therapist.

Since the goal for everyone should be to resolve their problems as quickly as possible, people should be free to pick and choose their therapy and their therapist, and use several different therapy approaches. People should be free to choose but in reality they are not, as I have found trying to ask Chris’s doctors for the use of other therapies while he was under their care. Just because psychiatry is slowly opening the door to acknowledging the value of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for schizophrenia doesn’t mean that CBT should be the only therapy employed. CBT may not work for you.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy can be slow going, so I have introduced Chris to Family Constellation Therapy, sound therapy including the Tomatis Method, and Emotional Freedom Technique. I am of the strong opinion that schizophrenia needs to be solved at the intuitive level. You literally have to become a different emotional being inside your body in order for your sense of self to develop.

The sound shaman as therapist

Chris’s notes from the fourth session

Before we began the session of sound therapy, the shaman asked me how I was doing.

I explained that I had been feverish for a day prior to our meeting. We discussed the implications of this, how this is usually a sign that a change is needed in my behavior towards my body especially. He asked after my family, especially my father and brother, both away at the moment. He said that there was something I could do for my brother, but did not say what, and that I might not want to do this thing for him. These were the things I explored during the therapy, which took on a very concrete path, more understandable and clear than previously.

The shaman had moved his practice to different premises, such that instead of an airy, mystical environment it was now in a more intimate setting, smaller cosy rooms that felt more personable. There was no staring-out-windows-pretending I was a bird. Rather than playing with my surroundings, toying with the possibilities of super-grounded experience, I was able to be practically focused, to take up a larger living space and give full vent to my inner conflicts. My therapy session was like a dialogue, with my emotions expressing themselves as thoughts, which I was able to interpret because of the sounds. I got the vague sense that time was slowed down, and I could hear myself more clearly and understand my emotions better, without the implications of meaning, i.e. feelings of confusion were the “real” me, not some quest of fulfilment.

With the first set of sounds, I felt I could live inside my body with so much space, every nerve and muscle vibrated with the sounds, so that my leg felt like a wooden bat and stretched as long as the ceiling is high. My mind, usually relegated to my head and stuffed into his tiny cubicle, opened the windows on all my body and became clearer and louder. I began to cry at fleeting feelings I had for people I no longer see and some who I still see. I was not confused by fantasies of sex or violence, which I attribute this time to the therapy working, that my body was releasing judgments on these somewhat uncomfortable matters. I had recurring feelings of pain as I thought of my father and of my little brother. I have the sentiment now of guilt about these two people: I have been unwilling to accept my part in our sometimes difficult relationship. I discovered that the pain can only mean one thing: When I am hurt in a relationship the other person is hurt also, which shows affection on their part and not indifference as I often assume. With the sound therapy I can isolate problems and look at them from an exterior point of view.

Concerning how the therapy “works,” I think the success or failure of the therapy is dependent on my state of mind, and just because I wasn’t getting images of sex and violence does not mean that I am somehow “cured” or need to be “cured” of thinking of these things. I am humbled to say I feel as I have no control whatsoever of the images and thoughts that come to me as I lie down at the therapy. If there is any improvement in my well-being as a result of the therapy, well it is hard to say what part I had played in it, only that I can be more or less open in mind towards the work.

The intuitive mind

In addition to counting physical objects, numbers have a spiritual meaning that resonate with us at an unconscious level, according to sixth century Greek mathematician, Pythagoras. Pythagoras also believed that colors have a spiritual meaning and are aligned with musical notes. Though separated by centuries, Pythagoras, Dr. Masaru Emoto, Dr. Alfred Tomatis and and Chris’s sound shaman are speaking the language of resonance, that physical objects, colors and symbols have a vibratory energy that imbues the universe with connected meaning. Ancient peoples were much more intuitive than modern man. They sought meaning through numbers, symbols, colors, communed regularly with the gods, and looked for signs from the heavens. It doesn’t sound too terribly different than people today who are given a diagnosis of schizophrenia. In Chris’s reporting of his recent experience with sound therapy, he said “As I heard the colors and shapes……” This is not crazy thinking, this is intuitive thinking.

Numerology is these days considered an esoteric pursuit, but not to Pythagoras or maybe not to anyone on the autism spectrum. Some people on (or even off) the autism spectrum see colors in musical notes or numbers. Chris has always been extremely good with math and music. To be good at advanced math and music, one would assume that meaning and connectivity are seen in numbers and musical notes. Out of interest, I looked into Chris’s numerology by adding up all the numbers in his birth date (month, day and four digit number for year) and kept adding until I arrived at a number less than 10, in Chris’s case, the number 3.

According to career intuitive Sue Frederick, a good career choice for Chris would be actor or singer, to name just two possibilities arising from the number three. Interestingly, I seized upon acting as a way of breaking through Chris’s communication barrier when his doctor hinted that Chris was really good in the clinic’s acting class. Since then we have also discovered that Chris is a good singer. Numerology strikes me as good a way as any to make your career choice. Rather than tediously wading through the popular book What Color is Your Parachute?, why not make your career choice based on what Pythagoras might have chosen for you? I am putting Sue Frederick’s book I See Your Dream Job under the Christmas tree this year.

Medications and power

When Ian and I met with Dr. Stern earlier this month we urged her to take Chris off Serdolect and not to substitute another antipsychotic. For once, even Ian was on my side about the Serdolect after we realized that it can lead to sudden cardiac arrest. Somehow, Dr. X at the psychiatric hospital had “forgotten” to tell us about this particular side effect, probably because he had finally managed to get me to shut up about his adding a second medication on top of the Abilify. It was only after Chris went for an ECG that it dawned on me why he was having one in the first place. I didn’t bother researching Serdolect’s particular drawback because all antipsychotics have side effects (at least this one wasn’t clozapine) and I am sick and tired of continually being on the offensive with the doctors and being on the opposite side of Ian.

I feel that with the subsequent interventions that Chris has undertaken since leaving the hospital in May (Tomatis Therapy and Sound Therapy) he has a better grip on reality and will be in stronger position than before to get off these stupid medications once and for all. He also has to be in a stronger position to make his own case with Dr. Stern. I really hate having a psychiatrist involved in what I consider our “family business,” meaning Chris, Ian and I coming up with our own agreed strategy. If there were no prescription medications involved, we would only be needing Dr. Stern to act as a counselor. Prescription medications means a psychiatrist has to be involved. The psychiatrist then has gained enormous power over the decision making of the patient and family. I forgot to add that there is a second psychiatrist involved who I haven’t met – the whom who prescribes the medications. This is an arrangement that we agreed upon with Dr. Stern so that she can meet with Chris without medications being the main topic of discussion. Where there is a psychiatrist, there is medication, however, because Dr. Stern needs to confer with the second psychiatrist about them.

If I think too much about this and actively intervene, I’ll be headed for another round of sleepless nights. My new strategy is to trust Dr. Stern to do the right thing with Chris’s fully informed consent. Dr. Stern has been remarkably open to listening to us in the past and has professed a desire to see Chris off the medications “at some point.” The point where that “some point” is located is of course up to debate.

The plastic brain

The concept that the brain is plastic (has the ability to change and grow) was not in vogue a mere six years ago when Chris had his breakdown. The doctors informed us very solemnly that Chris absolutely had to be on antipsychotics because otherwise his brain would deteriorate. They spoke in terms of his brain becoming rigid, like solidifying, but flawed, concrete. Ian and I were scared stiff that we had already lost precious time and that Chris would soon be little more than a vegetable if we didn’t put him on meds right away. (There are valid reasons why antipsychotics may be needed for the short term.)

A person experiencing a psychotic breakdown is terrifying to the uninformed observer, to whom the symptoms must surely be evidence of brain deterioration. This is where science will rush in with neuroleptic medications to “put a stop” to the problem. Pharmacy has you in a moment of crisis and it will not let go of you. The fear of a return of symptoms and therefore a further deterioration of the brain is ever present.

But today’s New York Times reports on how a dancer, who has lived with cerebral palsy for over 30 years, has improved beyond recognition through unconventional “body work” training he undertook. His choreographer specifically did not want to learn much about his condition, because that would have prejudiced any outcomes she was hoping to achieve. It is also interesting that the dancer underwent twelve years of physical therapy without getting the dramatic changes in the way he walks that the body work therapy has achieved in a year.

“Everybody told me there was nothing I could do,” he said. “That’s just what you hear, from the time you’re 5 to adulthood. Tamar gave me an option.”

Everybody tells you that schizophrenia is a chemical imbalance in the brain that will require you to take medications probably for the rest of your life. Don’t believe it. There are many exciting therapies that Chris has undertaken that are changing the way we view what “the experts” tell us is a lifelong illness. Most of these therapies have not been publicized for schizophrenia.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/25/arts/dance/25palsy.html?_r=1&hpw

Getting out in the world

I had a nice chat with Chris last night. He has decided to enter the annual race next month around our city. This is just super, on many levels. Chris is a person who I have never seen run, not even as a small boy. He just didn’t run, period. (He didn’t even walk until he was sixteen months old.) I hope I am not reading too much into this, but my recollection is that the day after his first sound therapy, he went out for a small run. He has been out nearly every day since. He told me at the time that he no longer wanted to stay in the house all day, he just had to get out.

His wanting to exercise is also partly the issue of the weight he had put on. I told him that the weight goes with the medications and that he shouldn’t beat himself up too much over this by starving himself or thinking that exercise will fix this. At least 70% of weight loss is what you are eating, not what exercise you do. Unfortunately, the medications make it impossible not to eat. Until Chris is off his medications, weight will be a problem.

We discussed how long he should continue with the sound therapy. I believe we have only started. Chris said that he had to keep adjusting to a different reality and he didn’t know if this was useful or not. So we discussed the pros and cons and then he said something very interesting. He said that after undergoing the sound therapy he was no longer afraid. I’ll leave it there.